Updates...

Updates

Invalid Transaction Reissue – 22 June 2017

On June 20th and 21st, there was a total of 239 invalid transactions. Some miners may of seen that these transactions did not show up in their wallet and that the transaction ID (txid) was not present on the blockchain.

All of these transactions will be manually processed over the next day. The amount owed will be paid out, but the old transaction ID will not be used. The old transaction ID will remain in your worker’s payout history, but remember that the transaction amount has been paid out.

Invalid Transactions and Payment Delay – 21 June 2017

Currently we are experiencing some issues with payouts that affected some miners, due to the backlog on the Ethereum network from the Status ICO. The miner’s that have suffered from this issue, will see that there was a transaction issued according to Alpereum’s website but the transaction ID (txid) is invalid and they never received the ETH in their wallet.

There is still a 2+ hour backlog on the Ethereum network as we write this, so we have temporarily disabled any payments until the network stabilizes. This is to prevent anymore invalid transaction issues in the meantime.

Once the network stabilizes, we will re-run all of the payouts for those that have received invalid transaction ID’s (txid). Your ETH is safe!

Transaction Delay and US West Brief Outage – 20 June 2017

Due to the current Status ICO that is on-going, the Ethereum network is currently backlogged with transactions. A lot of miners may see that they had a payout, but the transaction ID has not yet published on the blockchain. Please be rest assured that the payout will end up in your wallet with time, it is just standing in queue at the present moment. Thank you for your patience.

US West experienced a brief outage this afternoon, the issue has been remedied.

Recent Downtime and 0.05 Minimum Payout – 13 June 2017

In the past few days there has been several periods of downtime on the stratum servers, not just the website. This has been due yet again to a private networking issue in relation to our main stack of servers in Europe that host very crucial items like the main database which all locations communicate with. We are currently working with a network engineer from the data center and several others to ensure there is a permanent resolution to the problem. We’ve been assured that any switch out of faulty networking equipment will be done in such a away that it will not interrupt the server stack. We understand this is bad timing, and we thank you for your patience.

Due to the increased network difficulty and user request, we’ve lowered the minimum payout to 0.05 ETH on Port 3002. Your previous balance will be rolled into the new minimum, there is nothing you need to do or change on your end.

Website Statistics and Ticket Queue – 11 June 2017

Due to the increased popularity with Ethereum overall, we have went from a few thousand website requests a day to over 100,000 daily requests. Our software and server that serves our frontend statistics has been having issues and occasional downtime due to the increased load. Our staff are working on the issue and will have a remedy to the problem soon. Please be aware that this issue is a purely visual, frontend problem only and completely separate from the backend of the pool (load-balancer, stratum, nodes, payout etc). It’s stability does not affect your submitted shares, payout, or Ether. The pool is still functioning as normal for your miner!

With the increased popularity, there has also been an influx of support tickets. We are trying our best to prioritize support tickets and answer them in relevance to their severity/issue. We are working overtime to answer all of the tickets, but we do apologize if there is a bit of delay at the moment. Thank you for your patience!

0.2% Pool Fee and VARDIFF Removed – 9 June 2017

The pool fee has officially been increased from 0% to 0.2%. This will allow us to maintain our server infrastructure to keep up with the demand. The recent growth is exciting, and we are planning ahead to make sure that our miners have the smoothest overall mining experience possible.

For the past 10 months Alpereum has been proud to offer our Variable Difficulty (VARDIFF) ports to public miners. On other Ether pools, VARDIFF is not do-able because it is easily exploitable. Alpereum staff created custom monitoring software that would auto ban any worker attempting to submit a share on a higher difficulty than intended. Making the exploit almost impossible. However, the amount of share data we must keep in our databases is growing exponentially with the demand and it is not maintainable any longer. We’ve removed VARDIFF altogether, and the 4000 ports that worked on VARDIFF will now redirect your miner automatically to port 3002.

Port and Infrastructure Changes – 10 April 2017

Over the past 2 weeks we have been slowly deploying and testing completely new infrastructure in the USA and Asia locations. It is finally ready for production usage, and we’ve conducted all the necessary DNS changes. The largest change in the infrastructure overall (Europe included) is the use of a load balancers and stratum virtual machines that can easily be scaled up or down dependent upon the amount of load and connections in that location. This will help to reduce stale shares, and provide a more smooth and stable platform for Alpereum as a whole.

We’ve also added a completely new location, US West which is located in Seattle. To connect to this new location simply change your stratum server setting in your mining software to uswest.alpereum.ch. We have also changed the naming scheme of our US East location, instead of usa.alpereum.ch it is now useast.alpereum.ch. No need to hurry and change your miners, usa.alpereum.ch will permanently point to useast.alpereum.ch from now on. The Asia location has also been changed from Hong Kong to Singapore, however the stratum server still remains the same: asia.alpereum.ch

For the past several months, Alpereum has been known to host lower difficulty ports such as 500 million difficulty and 1 billion difficulty. While we prided ourselves in this feature, the recent popularity of Ether has made us a target by malicious botnet miners that use infected devices to CPU mine on the lower difficulties. This created a significant amount of load for very little hashrate benefit. We also do not believe in allowing these malicious actors to persist. We’ve sinced removed those lower difficulties, and changed around our port scheme as a whole. The old ports still work, however they redirect to the new ones. You can see the new port layout on our Join Page.

Status Update – 6 April 2017

We suffered 35 minutes of downtime in all locations at approximately 02:02 CET due to a corrupt database. No data or payout was lost! Our slave database was able to successfully resync all data back to the master.

We do apologize for any inconveniences this may of caused.

Status Update – 11 March 2017

There was an issue with a few of our USA Parity Nodes that was not spotted by our automated monitoring systems. This caused some miners to receive bad work that resulted in a large amount of invalid shares. The issue in question occurred at random intervals over a period of 8 hours. We have since fixed the problem and our USA location should be healthy and stable.

We do apologize for any inconveniences this may of caused.

Status Update – 12 February 2017

From approximately 20:00 10 February to 19:00 11 February there was a period in which some blocks mined by Alpereum were invalid. This resulted in less than stellar performance during that period. The cause of this issue was due in part to a newer version of Parity that was implemented. We have since rolled back the pool to a proven version of Parity, and performance has gone back to normal.

While we do conduct a heavy amount of testing prior to implementing anything live, this issue went unseen until brought over onto the actual live environment. We do apologize for any inconveniences this may of caused.

Invalid Transactions – 13 January 2017

On January 10th & 11th there was 55 miners that had invalid txids on a few of their payout transactions due to some propagation issues caused by a bug in Parity. We have already updated Parity to the latest version and the propagation issues have subsided. We ran our transaction validation software and identified all invalid transactions.

Miners that were affected have already been paid out from address 0x005c60bE1D170457A4A9520567Bc4aEa70d33EEa. The invalid txid will still exist in the payout table on your worker’s page, however you have been compensated! Please check your wallet for transactions from the mentioned address.

Status Update – 29 December 2016

All block confirmation and invalid transaction issues have been resolved. Any miners that suffered from invalid transactions over the past several days have been reimbursed. No miners lost any credit, and the pool has been running smoothly without any interruption. We appreciate your patience, and we will see you all in the New Year!

Invalid Transactions & Pending Blocks – 23 December 2016

Currently we are experiencing some issues with payouts that affected a small amount of miners. The miner’s that have suffered from this issue, will see that there was a transaction issued according to Alpereum’s website but the transaction ID (txid) is invalid and they never received the ETH in their wallet. We are currently working on a solution to the issue. Be rest assured that we are recording these invalid transactions in our system, and if needed we will manually payout the affected miners. It is still perfectly safe to keep mining. Your ETH is safe and you will be credited the appropriate amount.

There is also another small issue we are working on, were some blocks take longer then usual to move from pending to confirmed. This only causes a slight delay between when a block is found, and your balance is updated. This has no affect on your actual mining performance and you will be credited the appropriate amount.

Brief USA Outage – 17 December 2016

The rack our servers were located on in the USA suffered a peering issue on the network, causing some miners to lose connectivity. The approximate downtime was 25 minutes. We do apologize for the inconvenience this may of caused for some miners.

DAG Update – 6 December 2016

With the new DAG update today, a majority of miners miners with 2GB GPU’s cannot mine Ether anymore. This affects all mining pools, not just Alpereum.

Some miners with 2GB GPU’s were stuck in an infinite loop after the DAG update. Due to the brief affect this had on our pool statistics, we were forced to restart the pool in all locations to essentially boot these miners off. This led to an approximate downtime of 1 minute. We do apologize for the inconvenience.

If you are on Windows and you are not able to mine currently, please check how much video memory your GPU(s) posess. To do so, simply open “Run” and type “dxdiag”. Once the DirectX Diagnostic Tool opens, click on “Display”. If your Approximate Total Memory is less than 2048MB then chances are you not able to mine Ether anymore with that GPU. There is certain GPU manufacturers that may squeeze by, but that is on a case-by-case basis due to driver buffers, kernel code, etc. that vary depending on the manufacturer.

25th of November – Alpereum has implemented the suggested Parity limits as published by Ethcore.

Alpereum has implemented the suggested Parity limits as published by Ethcore.
The transition was practically seamless, but there was a chance that a few miners may of experienced less than 1 minute of downtime. We do apologize about this.
If you have any other issues or concerns, feel free to submit a ticket or email us at support@alpereum.zendesk.com
Happy Mining!

Thursday Nov 18th, we upgraded our main daemons to the latest Parity. A newer version which addressed the problems which affected us (and many other pools) on Nov 17th, where our deamons were not syncronizing correctly.

The deployment was not entirely smooth. Which caused a short block drought and a normally avoidable pool restart, for which we are sorry.

Once we restarted the Europe, Asia, and US servers it was quickly discovered that the new daemons resulted in incorrect luck calculations on our performance page: https://www.alpereum.ch/performance/

The Alpereum ETH pool is * not* performing at 90 % ! It is performing at 100 % and our developers are addressing the faulty luck calculations as we speak.

We are also changing the way in which we host our website, which will result in a much more responsive UI. Over the next 14 days several UI optimizations will take place to improve website loading times. These optimizations are for the website, and will not interfere with mining in any way.

Operations at Alpereum.ch are currently running smoothly and without issue, even if our statistical data is erronious, a pronblem which will be addressed and closed within the next few hours.

Issues 17. 2016 & Back to Normal – 18 Nov. 2016

As some of you are aware already, the pool has had some severe issues over the past day or so. This was mainly due to a few of our Ethereum Daemons (Nodes), mainly in Europe not syncing with some of the wrong data even though they were the correct versions and would even report back the right info when parsed.
It was a very rare and peculiar instance that we have not encountered before. The issue is resolved, and we are going to keep a close eye on all of our nodes to ensure they are in fact receiving the correct sync data during the upcoming fork releases.

While Alpereum strive to maintain absolute stability, through these troubled days on the Ethereum network, with forks, DDoS attacks and multiple deamon releases (and issues), it is not always possible. Regardless, by mining through Alpereum, you always have the security of a professional team, taking immideate action, when the situation warrents it.

The pool performance stabilized since we fixed the issue, and we are finding legitimate blocks. We do apologize for inconvenience we caused you and your miners.

If you have any other questions, comments, or concerns please open a ticket or email support@alpereum.zendesk.com

Happy Mining!

The Alpereum Team

Update: October 13th, 2016 21:50 CET
Transaction Woes

If you currently have transactions that show up as “Unable to locate Transaction entry” on Etherscan, you are not alone. Currently many transactions are in queue to be processed on the blockchain. This is due to recent attacks on the Ethereum network, and is no fault of ours. Across the entirety of the Ethereum network, there is approximately 20,000 pending transactions and growing. A small number of those transactions are payouts from Alpereum. While some payouts may get through right away, some others may take hours to process.

The payout interval has been changed temporarily to every 8 hours, 0.2 ETH minimum balance. We do not want to overcrowd the queue.

Please be aware that all of your earned Ether is safe and you will be paid out eventually!

We thank the miners of Alpereum for being patient with us while we deal with these issues.

The Alpereum Team

Update: October 8th, 20:45 CET
Invalid Transaction Issue

Currently there is an issue where some miner’s transactions are not being issued proper Transaction IDs. Thus they are not receiving payment. We have our software developers scripting a transaction validator that will essentially crawl the database and identify all invalid transactions. Then those invalid transactions will be rolled into your current balance and paid out again.

Please keep in mind that your earned ETH is safe and not going anywhere. You can continue to mine, just understand that if you had an invalid transaction that payment may be delayed.

We do apologize for this inconvience, and we are going to have a full resolution to this issue over the next 48 hours.

The Alpereum Team

Update: October 4th, 19:45 CET
The Alpereum ETH pool is again stable after todays attack on the Ethereum Network.

Alpereum staff have implemented several controls to prevent the current Ethereum network attack from affecting the stability and performance of the pool. The Ether pool is back online and stable again at all locations.

If you have any other issues or concerns, please feel free to submit a support ticket in the bottom left or email support@alpereum.zendesk.com

Happy Mining!

The Alpereum Team

Update: October 4th, 19:45 CET
The Alpereum ETH pool is again stable after todays attack on the Ethereum Network.

Alpereum staff have implemented several controls to prevent the current Ethereum network attack from affecting the stability and performance of the pool. The Ether pool is back online and stable again at all locations.

If you have any other issues or concerns, please feel free to submit a support ticket in the bottom left or email support@alpereum.zendesk.com

Happy Mining!

The Alpereum Team

Update: October 4th, 12:30 CET
The previous Ethereum attacker is currently gearing up again for new spam deluge.

Address 0x3898d7580aa5b8ad8a56fcd7f7af690e97112419, previously used in the spam attack, has been creating >1000 new contracts, currently at a rate of about 30/min.

This is causing disturbance and downtime on the network, including pools.

After the Geth-issue on Septh 18th, which so dramatically affected the Ethereum network. the Alpereum Ether Pool migrated to the Parity daemon (1.3.0, https://get.parity.io .deb) in the morning hours of Sept 19th.

Due to the Geth issue, the pool suffered complete failure between Sept 18th 19:58 CET and Sept 19th 04:00 CET, with no data being recorded, a total of 8 hours.
The complete Network Hashrate at the time was 5.4 TH/s.

Alpereum chooses to compensate its miners for a full 10 hours of non-stop mining, the additional 2 hours compensating stability issues which also plagued the pool outside the downtime.
Miner compensations are based on the average hashrate before the crash, including stale shares over 10 hours, and multiplied with 1.25 (25 % added for good measure).
These compensations were out manually, to all miners on September 20th/21th 2016, according to this table.

After the migration to Parity, it was found that the Parity client did not perform to expectations. Synchronization issues kept plaguing the servers, and orphaned blocks were found, out of proportion to what would be expected.
As the Geth 1.4.12 patch in the meantime had been released, we chose to abandon Parity and revert back to the tried-and-tested, now updated Geth 1.4.12, which had been patched to address the original Geth-issue.

Thus from Sept 19th 04:00 CET and all the way to when the pool was restored to Geth 1.4.12 (Sept 20th, 22:30 CET) the external miners on our pool in the period, also have suffered what would appear to be sub-performance.
We gathered the data to compensate them as well, for the full 42.5 hours we ran with Parity, in a similar fashion as to the downtime compensations in the table, listed above.
These compensations were out manually, to all miners on September 20th/21th 2016, according to this table.

All functionality, including payouts on the Alpereum Pool, has been fully restored, and the pool has been running normally on Geth 1.4.12 since 23:30 CET, September 20th 2016.
There were no downtime in connection with daemon switch from Parity back to Geth, and testing with Parity will continue moving forwards. Alpereum can now seamlessly switch between the Geth and Parity, and indeed, run both at the same time.
Experimentation with Parity will continue, but not on the main servers, before stability and performance can be guaranteed.

In short, even when the whole Ethereum network is on fire, not a Weii has been lost for those, mining against the Alpereum ETH Pool. Something to consider when selecting your pool in the future.

This concludes the Geth-issue Sept 18th-20th 2016, and we feel confident all our miners will be compensated appropriately for the downtime.
We point out that this serious issue was due to no fault on the part of Alpereum, but nevertheless take our commitment to service excellence seriously.

UPDATE 21:30 (CET):
Balances (back to 04:00am CET this morning and to present) are now correctly updated, and blocks found are now being correctly accounted for.

Individual balances, even if above 0.2 ETH, are still not being paid out, pending testing being completed on our Parity payout module, but also Payouts will soon be engaged, restoring full functionality to the Pool.

Manual reimbursement for (generously set) 10h of downtime for all workers, who were mining against Alpereum, when the Geth-issues started 19:58 CET on the 18th, and all the way to 04:00 CET on the 19th, will commense in 4 hours.

We are working hard on solving the issues in the best possible fashion, and not a Weii will be lost for any Alpereum client, from downtime or otherwise.

Thank you for your patience!

UPDATE 17:00 (CET):
Since our switch to the ‘Parity’ client, early in the morning on Sept 19th, Alpereum has been correctly tracking shares mined by each miner.
Payouts have been disabled, and the miner balances do not update correctly, but when full service is established (current ETA: 20:00 CET), all miners will have their balances from the ‘Parity’ update at exactly 04:00:00 CET, to present moment, updated and paid out.

From the time interval where Alpereum services was completely unavailable, from 19:58:03 CET on Sept 18th to 04:00:00 CET on Sept 19th, we are conducting manual reimbursements for all miners.
It can be debated whether Alpereum is at fault in the Geth issue, or if we did not bring our services back in a timely fashion, but we want all our miners to know that regardless of circumstances, mining against the Alpereum pool will always see you justly rewarded!

Miners are encouraged to assist us in the manual reimbursements of their downtime, by sending us their worker links and estimated loss of ETH revenue, due to the downtime period.
We will confirm the data and compensate each and every miner, adding some buffer to the downtime period, in both ends, to ensure full compensation.

Full service, incl. balance updates and payouts, are restored shortly. Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE 04:30(CET): Alpereum ETH Pool Back online
As of 04:25 CET, Sept 19th, the Alpereum ‘Parity’ daemons have syncronized, and the pool relaunched on the ‘Parity’ daemons, with full functionality, except payouts, which are disabled pending thorough tests on ‘Parity’, but balances will be updated and kept.
Payouts are expected to be functioning as well within the next 12 hours, and no funds will be lost in the meantime.
For the loss of service in the 8 hours Alpereum services were unavailable, and although strictly not an Alpereum issue, all our clients that were with us prior to the Geth issue, are subject to a refund from us for the downtime suffered.
Send us a worker link at support@alpereum.zendesk.com, along with estimated ETH loss, and we’ll verify and pay the loss-of-service refund directly to your mining wallet.
On Aplereum.ch we’ll keep uptating on the issue, until all test unanimously point to the issue being fully resoleved.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. We will continue to monitor the situation carefully.UPDATE 02:35(CET): Alpereum ETH Pool shortly back online, after global ‘Geth’ client issue
Today at around 20:00 CET (Paris time) Sep. 18th 2016, the ‘Geth’ clients on our pool started failing / producing corrupt blockchain data, forcing our pool services to a halt.
It was quickly determined that this was caused by a general problem with the ‘Geth’ client and the network, and Alpereum was quickly switched to global use of the ‘Parity’ client, but a speedy relaunch was prevented by the need for the Parity clients on our servers to fully syncronize.
Several descriptions and discussions on the geth problem are available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum
As of 02:30 CET, Sept 19th, the Alpereum ‘Parity’ nodes has almost syncronized, and the pool will soon be relaunched on the ‘Parity’ client, with full functionality.
For the loss of service, altough strictly not an Alpereum issue, all our clients are subject to a refund from us for the downtime.
Send us a worker link at support@alpereum.zendesk.com, along with estimated ETH loss, and we’ll verify and pay the loss-of-service refund directly to the mining wallets.
We will continue to monitor the situation clarefully, and will update alpereum.ch front page as the situation develops and is finally resolved.

/Alpereum

Stability Problems – Sunday Sept 18th/19th 2016 – UPDATE 01:11 (CET):

Today at around 20:00 CET (Paris time) Sep. 18th 2016, the ‘Geth’ clients on our pool started failing / producing corrupt blockchain data, forcing our pool services to a halt.
It was quickly determined that this was caused by a general problem with the ‘Geth’ client and the network, and the Alpereum pool was quickly switched to global use of the ‘Parity’ client, but a speedy relaunch was prevented by the need for the Parity clients on our servers to fully synchronize.
Several descriptions and discussions on the geth problem are available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum

We expect full service on Alpereum to be back shortly, as the Alpereum ‘Parity’ nodes have synchronized, and the pool has been relaunched on the ‘Parity’ client, with full functionality.

We will update on the situation with regular intervals.

UPDATE 23:32 (CET): The geth issue seems systemic. We are migrating to the parity client, as fast as possible.

Sunday 20:18 (Zürich time), the geth client on our Europe, Asia and US servers started producing corrupt data, and had to be restarted.

Unfortunately by the time it was restarted, the respective blockchain data on the serves had corrupted as well, and had to be restored from backup and updated to recent state.

Total downtime realated to this issue is expected to be 2 1/2h total.

Clients directly affected are welcome to write support@alpereum.zendesk.com, and will be refunded ETH production lost, due to this incident.
We have increased the backup frequency of blockchain data, so that a similar failure of the geth client in the future, will result in much less downtime.